Enlightenment. The Jewish embrace of Pushkin was not being returned, and the more they loved him, the less fond he seemed to be of them (to paraphrase a line from Eugene Onegin ). With all their success—because of all their success—the highly cultivated children of upwardly mobile Jewish businessmen felt lonely indeed. The great modern transformation did not just combine tribalism with “ascetic rationalism.” As far as the European Jews, at least, were concerned, it was primarily—and tragically—about tribalism. By acting in a Weberian (ascetic rational) fashion, many of them found themselves in an impossible, and possibly unique, situation. Deprived of the comforts of their tribe and not allowed into the new ones created by their Apollonian neighbors, they became the only true moderns. Thus the Jews stood for the discontents of the Modern Age as much as they did for its accomplishments. Jewishness and existential loneliness became synonyms, or at least close intellectual associates. “Modernism” as the autopsy and indictment of modern life was not Jewish any more than it was “degenerate,” but there is little doubt that Jewishness became one of its most important themes, symbols, and inspirations. Modernism was a rebirth of Romanticism and the next great Promethean, prophetic revolution. (Realism did not propose a brand-new universe and thus never left the shadow of Romanticism.) Once again, would-be immortals set out to overcome history and reinvent the human by improving on Homer and the Bible. This time, it was an internal odyssey in search of the lost self: the confession, and perhaps salvation, of the Eternal Jew as the Underground Man. Modernism was a rebellion against the two bodies of modernity, and no one expressed or experienced it more fully than the chosen Jewish son who had rejected the capitalism and tribalism of his father and found himself all alone. It was a culture of solitude and self-absorption, a personification of Mercurian exile and reflexivity, a manifesto of the newly invented rebellious adolescence as a parable for the human condition. Of the three most canonical voices of this revolution, one belonged to Franz Kafka, who classified—and damned—his businessman father as belonging to that “transitional generation of Jews which had migrated from the still comparatively devout countryside to the cities” and failed to retain, much less pass on, any meaningful Judaism beyond “a few flimsy gestures.” According to his filial denunciation (a genre that another modern Jewish prophet would make